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Manufacturing presents opportunities in the next 6 years

Too often high quality manufacturing jobs go unfilled in California because of a variety of issues including lack of training and/or a lack of knowledge about the job's merits. Manufacturing jobs can provide early success, good wages, technical skills, and a pathway to the middle class. We asked the Labor Market Information department to provide their 2024 projections for the top manufacturing non-executive job openings and their wages. For the occupations with more than 2,000 openings here's a look at the top 5 wages and opportunities:

$56,315 -- First line supervisors of production and operation workers -- 4,770 openings

That's more than 31,000 good job opportunities in the next 6 years with an average $42.3k salary. And that's just the manufacturing occupations with more than 2,000 openings. There are hundreds of other occupations with higher wages. It's important for our young workers to understand the opportunity that's available to them and even more critical for our policymakers to understand how important it is to grow manufacturing opportunity here in California.

More pieces of the California manufacturing jobs story

There were some independent items worth noting in the California manufacturing employment narrative this week.

First the California Labor Market Information Department, in its monthly report this week, announced the loss of 1,600 manufacturing jobs in March. This decline brings California’s manufacturing jobs growth to 3.4 percent since the recession, while the U.S. grew its manufacturing base by 7.4 percent.

In the same week came an announcement from a southern California manufacturer, General Magnaplate, who said they would be shutting down their manufacturing facility in Ventura because of a difficult business climate and an unwarranted stormwater lawsuit against them. Magnaplate is a small manufacturer with only around 25 workers in their Ventura facility, but that means nothing to their employees who are left looking for work. The good news is that families in Texas and New Jersey will likely gain employment because the company’s facilities in those locations will pick up production. Just one example of the drips of manufacturing loss accumulating over the years in California.

With some of this bad news came good news, at least you’d think. The Advanced Energy Economy (AEE) Institute released a report this week indicating that the “Advanced energy” sector generated jobs at six times the rate of the overall California economy last year. The good news stops there. The problem is that often those jobs are coming at the expense of reduced job growth and investment in other areas of the economy. If we are spending too much for those jobs then we incur even greater losses in the rest of the economy. The report even admits it on page 6: “California’s advanced Fuel Sector was the only segment of Advanced Energy that did not create additional jobs in 2015. Challenged by several factors including persistently low gasoline prices, Advanced Fuels saw employment decline more than 50 percent from 2014, resulting in a loss of about 8,300 jobs.”

Basically the AEE report tells us that if you raise prices on something you can get more people working on ways to reduce consumption. That is of course not a surprise. But when it comes to the entire economy, our collective data is telling us that our state is still lagging the country in manufacturing jobs and investment growth.

Update on MFG jobs vs the U.S.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics and California's Employment Development Department recently made their annual revisions to employment data. California manufacturing still lags behind the country in manufacturing job growth since the recession, though the state did see a little bump comparatively to the country.

On the month-to-month front, California lost 4,200 manufacturing jobs in January.

We ask you, is this reaching California's potential? Are we comfortable with this direction? The manufacturing renaissance is a tremendous moment of opportunity for California to leverage and grow opportunities for its middle class working families. As stated in this great National Association of Manufacturers video, "Nothing happens unless we hit that start button."

California must get its fair share of U.S. manufacturing renaissance

Last week we looked at recent investment levels of manufacturing across the country and found that California is still lagging the country in the ever-important category of new and expanded facilities. This week we took a look at the state's manufacturing employment levels since 2000 versus the country. The California trend continues with a larger percentage loss than the rest of the United States.